Looking back... Call of Duty

Once upon a time, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ruled the WWII PC FPS world. Then the majority of the guys who made it broke ranks with MoH: AA developer 2015 and the game's publisher EA, formed Infinity Ward and delivered for its first project Call of Duty, which stuck a potato masher under Allied Assault's arse and blew it to smithereens.

But how did the brains behind Call of Duty whip up such a sterling title and what were they thinking during the creation process? Our colleagues on PC Zone magazine recently sat down with Infinity Ward president Grant Collier - as Call of Duty 2 has just gone over the top - to chat about his company's first masterpiece.

IMMERSION:
The goal of the game was immersion. We wanted players to feel like they were in the shoes of the soldiers - that they were in that place and time period. We wanted people dodging bullets when they were in their seats, to sit there flinching and cringing, and we went to all the lengths we could think of at the time - the explosions, the planes, the noise. Later, our military advisors came on board and told us a few more things we could add - you can see even more of that stuff in Call Of Duty 2.

SQUAD COMBAT:
Call Of Duty was the first time where you had real squad warfare. You had situations with you know, ten on ten, 20 on 20, 100 on 200. You had real large-scale warfare, and I'm proud of how that came together. It set a high benchmark for a lot of games. If you want squad warfare, it's got to be as good as Call Of Duty - otherwise, why even bother? I can't think of any other game that has robust squad warfare - certainly not on the same scale."

MODDING:
I'm a big fan of the mod community, so we tried to make COD as accessible to modding as possible - but the modders just weren't there. They were doing all kinds of mods for Allied Assault, but for Call Of Duty it wasn't anywhere near the same level. And we made the game much easier to mod than Allied Assault... In AA, there was nothing - you had to hack the executable to make a mod. So if I could go back and have time to work on the game more, I'd spend it making the game more accessible to the modding masses, with more robust tools.

SOLO MISSIONS:
OK, the British missions. The Special Forces solo operations... That sucks. Well, maybe it doesn't suck, but it wasn't good. Every game does that, and what's special about Call Of Duty is the mass warfare: 100 guys versus 200 guys, that's what makes Call Of Duty special. 'No man fights alone!' That's the motto, and we're sticking to it from now on. There are no more solo missions in COD2.

HEALTH:
We could have done health better, which is why we've changed it in the sequel. We've watched people play the game: they'll be fighting and fighting and then they'll get down to about ten health and basically stop playing. Then they start backtracking through the level, looking for health packs, and that just kills the action. I really like how we do it in the new game, with no health gauge or anything. Now, you're either dead or alive. It lets you stay in the action longer.

AI:
The AI was good, but it could've been better. We knew from the start that while the enemy AI is important, the friendly AI is what you're seeing all the time. So we spent more time on the friendly AI than the enemy. That paid off to a certain extent, because it added a lot to the immersion. But at the same time, the enemies would sometimes just sit in a certain area, and they'd do the whole whack-a-mole thing. They'd just be popping up and firing and you'd just wait for their head to pop up and then shoot them. There's none of that in the new game.

SKILL LEVELS:
Some people say they can complete Call Of Duty in eight hours, but they're playing it on Easy... If I was in god mode, I could get through it in three hours - it's just not an accurate representation of how long it takes to play. If you're a veteran gamer, go for the veteran skill level - simple.

We try to make games that appeal to the hardcore and to the mass-market, and there are a lot of people who don't play a lot of videogames who are just terrified. I see people on the easiest difficulty level, they're just on their bellies crawling through the level, trying to shoot guys from a mile away. And I'm like, 'oh my god dude, just get up and f***ing butt the guy with your rifle!'

You have to cater for both types and that's where the difficulty level comes in. We're talking about trying to do something where we gauge your skill level through how you play and then having a ramping difficulty level. Maybe next time.

GLORY DAYS:
Some of our favourite things in COD are the little things. For example, because we spent so much time on the Allied behaviour, there are a lot of neat things that would happen. I remember a story from our lead designer, Zied Rieke. He tried to throw a grenade though a window and it hit the side of the building and bounced back. One of his buddies went into glory mode and jumped on the grenade for him and saved his life. And he's like, 'I f***ing love that guy. He gave his life to allow me to keep playing.' Whenever a grenade is thrown they usually run, but there's a small chance that they'll throw themselves on it. And stuff like that happens because we spent so much time on the AI for the friendlies. The German AI wouldn't do that though. They're not willing to give their lives for their comrades.

GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT OF THE GAME:
Greatest achievement. Hmmm... I gotta pick something where I don't sound f***ing arrogant, you know? I feel that we sort of raised the bar for first-person shooters across the board. Which is a good thing for gamers... Hang on, that really sounds arrogant. 'Our game is so good, other developers have to work much harder.' That's f***ing arrogant. Let's talk about something else.

SMOOTH NET CODE:
One of our goals was to make a game that had really smooth 'net code, so we could have a lot of players in there. Plus, we wanted to have a competitive platform for multiplayer tournaments. The problem was COD was very animation-rich, and huge packet transfers were going on all the time. But we did a really good job, making it a fun platform to game on, and it could also be used as a competitive platform.

We only officially supported 32 players, but it's hardcoded at 64 players - we had 64-player games that were just insane. There were some people that worked at the US Government who had 64-player servers set up, which was wicked. They were tapping into the fibre backbone, the United States Internet backbone, and that's unlimited bandwidth. And these guys were worried because the packet transfers were so high that they were passing a terabyte of information in one month (1,000GB). In the end, they had to tone it down to 50 players. But that was some of the most fun I've ever had on a computer.

MULTIPLAYER:
I'm really proud of the multiplayer. We were concerned with how the multiplayer would be perceived, because we weren't trying to do a million things. We wanted to have the best infantry combat multiplayer game and we wanted to do it with four sides and have it balanced for all four sides - Germans, Russians, British and Americans. We did that and luckily everyone loved it - they really embraced the COD multiplayer. Everyone is so feature-centric - you know: 'Where's your vehicles, where's your ragdoll physics, why are you using Quake 3 Engine instead of Half-Life 2?' PC gamers are very hard to please, but luckily they liked it.

PC Zone Staff